01ragtop

I recently acquired a 2000 ZX7R with about 20,000 miles. I have been riding it, but I decided to get on with the maintenance, so this morning I tore down the top end to get a look at the valve clearances. Once I got the valve cover off, however, I noticed a couple of little black plastic bits just sitting on top of the head. A couple more were found when I pulled the cover off of the coil pick up sensor. I did some reading and figured it must be the upper cam chain guide, and sure enough, it is completely missing from under the valve cover.

Problem is, though, I did not find enough plastic bits to make up an entire guide. Far from it actually, so I am thinking this thing must be floating around inside the engine.

I did a search about this and found this post:

Upper Cam Chain Guide Broken into pieces.

But it sounds like the people in this post were lucky in that they found the whole piece. I didn't and I am wondering if anyone has ran across just a few pieces and what they did. I was thinking that I may need to drop the pan, but if I don't find the rest of the pieces in there, then what should I do?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

-Dan

jbreit

I found the remnants of mine down by the pick-up, behind the cover on the end of the crank. I think they broke loose when I was taking the cover off, I hadn't even noticed it until later...

From there to the pan is a short trip. If you drain the pan it may carry pieces in there out with it. The oil sump has a screen on in the inlet....it won't go past there. If it were mine, I might not even drop the pan depending on how much is MIA....find what I could and move on.

whitey (whitehendrix) has probably seen the most of of this...perhaps he'll chim in.